Following EA’s closure of the main Maxis studio last week, a former SimCity developer there has come forward to talk about their experiences working with EA to bring the new SimCity to life. Writing under the name ‘vertexnormal’, the developer explains that the…

UPDATE: Here’s a statement from EA: Today we are consolidating Maxis IP development to our studios in Redwood Shores, Salt Lake City, Helsinki and Melbourne locations as we close our Emeryville location. Maxis continues to support and develop new experiences…

You may remember that back when the SimCity reboot came out, the general consensus was ‘just play SimCity 2000 or SimCity 4 instead.’ But not everyone had access to one of these two excellent games, leaving them stuck with tiny…

One of the (few) luxuries of being a freelance games journalist is that I rarely tend to be uninformed when it comes to most titles. Many of my colleagues are generally across almost every inch of every genre of every platform; meaning I usually know what’s good and what’s not by the time embargo lifts. But every now and again, just like everyone else, I fall head over heels with the idea or the concept, rewatching trailers and gasping at the pure adrenaline of the hype.

Deep down I know it’s a poor idea, with every ounce of logic in my body pushing against the charging train of sheer want. So I preorder. I preorder Sim City. I preorder X: Rebirth. I preorder Diablo 3. I beg and plead for early keys from the online grey suppliers, desperate for the bucket of games heroin to quench my nagging thirst. But the payoff, when it finally, initially blissfully, arrives, I’m left wanting: The game is bad.

But the marketplace is not the same arena that it once was, where games came permanently hardcoded onto cartridges, CDs and DVDs. There were no updates, patches, mods or expansions back in the golden days, so if a title was poor, it stayed poor for eternity. Game breaking bugs could destroy the livelihoods of a developer, squandering years of work in a matter of days and weeks as returns and leftovers piled up on store shelves. But in 2014 things are different.

EA have announced that SimCity‘s offline mode has finally been deployed in Update 10, out today. Offline Mode will be available from the main menu, labelled as “Single Player”. Playing in this mode disables multiplayer, the SimCity World, Leaderboards, Achievements,…

Well, hasn’t this one been coming for a while. In one of the slowest and longest backflips in gaming, that started with the developer first claiming that offline play simply “wasn’t possible” in March last year before the internet comprehensively…

Maxis announced yesterday that they’d finally developed an offline mode for SimCity, to come soon in Update 10, but they’ve now posted a new entry on their official blog explaining just how difficult rewriting the code was to get it…

Remember how we used to post news pieces about SimCity, and someone would say every time “No offline mode? Not interested.” Well, friends, this one’s for you — EA and Maxis have written to us this morning to confirm that…

Cast your mind way back to October last year and you’ll remember that Maxis were preparing the path for modders to add and change content within SimCity. Now they are positively encouraging people to do so, but the guidelines they…

As you’ll see from the title above, you can now buy Battlefield: Bad Company 2, often acclaimed by many fans of the series as still the best yet, for just $1.00 during Origin’s Thanksgiving sales. Do that at this link…

SimCity has come a long way, in terms of both content expansion and damage control, since its disastrous launch back in March. Even putting aside the complete mess around servers, multiplayer and DRM for a moment, there were still huge concerns about the sheer number of game breaking bugs, alongside the claustrophobia of a tiny square patch of land where I’m expected to build Sydney inside Canberra.

I could count on my fingers the number of features that worked correctly as opposed to the ones that didn’t — traffic, RCI, resource sharing, chat, land claims, global market — all originally touted as next-generation city-sim features which instead became the stuff of embarrassing memes and gifs, plastered across the heavily traffic’d front pages of Reddit. Maxis and EA fell on their swords, dropping freebies of DLC and EA back-catalogued sweeteners to keep gamers on side. It was a two pronged attack — making sure people didn’t punish EA in the long run, on top of keeping player populations active — because without a community, there really is no SimCity.

Cities of Tomorrow aims to turn over a new leaf, not only by introducing a plethora of new systems and new resources, but also attempting to salve a lot of the frustration that comes with the territory.

EA and Maxis have released a new video for the upcoming Cities of Tomorrow expansion for SimCity, that shows off the various new technologies you’ll get access to once the expansion drops on November 14. As you’ll remember from the…

The upcoming ‘Cities of Tomorrow’ expansion for SimCity is launching in just a few short weeks, and it brings with it two respective factions: the Academy, who stand for clean energy and shiny buildings, and Omega, who stand for money,…

EA’s Australian office have responded to their victory yesterday in Choice’s ‘Shonky Awards’, after they were called out for charging $2.48 a minute to gamers who rang their support line. “We apologise to our players in Australia who were charged…

Australian consumer protection group Choice have given an award to EA Australia in their annual Shonky Awards for this year, slamming them over the $2.48 per minute cost to call their support line in Australia and complain about SimCity being…

Although the upcoming ‘Cities of Tomorrow’ expansion for SimCity doesn’t include an offline mode (stop reading now, if that’s all you were looking for) it does include gigantic monolithic future cities and a gigantic monolithic future-conglomerate company named OmegaCo who…

Ever since Maxis put the word out about wanting users to create their own modded content for SimCity, modders for SimCity 4 have been understandably bustling away on bringing some of their visions to life in the new game. The…

Well here we go. In an expansive and informative blog post titled State of SimCity, Patrick Buechner of Maxis has outlined the company’s position on many topics of importance to the city management game. The topics discussed include the management…

Are you still playing SimCity? Well maybe that will change now Maxis have announced their guidelines for modding the game. On the other hand, maybe it will not. As noted by VG247, Maxis announced the modding guidelines on the EA…

It looks like Maxis and EA think the time is right to deliver the first of SimCity‘s expansion packs: ‘Cities of Tomorrow’ will hit Origin on November 14. The expansion pack is set 50 years into the future, and will…